Do I still need a VPN for public WiFi if I'm taking these precautions?

VPN
1

Typical situations for me would be at Starbucks, my gym, the airport, in-flight, and hotels. My assumptions/precautions are:

  • I’m not doing anything shady, illegal, NSFW, or against the WiFi’s Terms of Service.
  • I don’t care about anyone tracking what apps/websites I’m using during that session (e.g. Google, Gmail, TikTok, Disney+, YouTube, Apple Music, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, iMessage, Slack, etc)
  • I’m already logged into all my apps/services on my devices (i.e. I avoid login screens in case an attacker is spoofing domains).
    • I’m already logged into my banking apps as well.
  • All websites I browse are encrypted with HTTPS.

FYI all of my devices are made by Apple (not sure if that makes a difference).

Do I still need to connect to a VPN for these situations?

2

You can’t know for sure if all your apps are using encrypted traffic. It has been along time that Apple “forced” apps to use HTTPS for example, but I mean, you could still develop an app using plain TCP connections and connect to an HTTP webserver by your own if you want. It is hard to check if all apps you use are encrypted. Even if you wireshark it, it could be that some apps have a fallback behaviour to unencrypted traffic if an encrypted connection fails, who knows (maybe thats a very paranoid thinking of me :)).

But if you are using only well know big apps, I think they should be safe so that this argument does not fit.

Would love to see if others have other reasons to concern, interesting topic.